Speaker or Narrator, and Point of View
The speaker is an unidentified figure describing the aftermath of a lynching.
Form and Meter
Iambic pentameter (five beats or stressed syllables per line, usually ten or eleven syllables), with a rhyme scheme of ABBACDDCEFFEGG.
Metaphors and Similes
The poem makes a point of not using any similes or metaphors so as not to trivialize or sanitize the horrors of lynching.
Alliteration and Assonance
"high heaven" - alliteration
"way of pain" - assonance
"night a bright" - assonance
"solitary star" - alliteration
"wild whim" - alliteration
"day dawned" and "crowds came" - alliteration
"little lads, lynchers" - alliteration
"fiendish glee" - assonance
Irony
While the second half of the poem describes blue-eyed women and dancing children, McKay shows that despite the connotations of innocence, purity, and love associated with these images, these white onlookers and their children are in fact inhuman monsters taking a perverse pleasure in the murder of an innocent African American.
Genre
Sonnet
Setting
Unspecified—the night and following morning in the area where a lynching took place
Tone
Bitter; appalled; grave
Protagonist and Antagonist
The protagonist is the lynching victim and the antagonists are the lynchers and onlookers.
Major Conflict
The poem's conflict centers around the aftermath of a lynching and how the speaker should depict it.
Climax
The climax comes in the final couplet and its suggestion that the horrors of racialized violence will continue for generations to come.
Foreshadowing
Understatement
Allusions
The first three lines allude to God the Father taking up Jesus' spirit after his death at the crucifixion.
The line "the awful sin remained still unforgiven" alludes to the concept of original sin, which Jesus died to forgive in the Christian tradition. In this case, though, the "ascen[sion]" of the victim's spirit does not coincide with the forgiveness of the "awful sin."
The “bright and solitary star” alludes to both the North Star, which slaves used to find their way to the North and to freedom, and the Star of Bethlehem, which helped the magi find their way to Bethlehem and to the baby Jesus.
Metonymy and Synecdoche
Personification
"Fate" is personified in the poems as acting on a "whim," and the star as also described as "hanging pitifully" over the body.
